Black holes warp the universe into a grotesque hall of mirrors

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Imagine a galaxy reflected in a fun house hall of mirrors. You'd see the galaxy, repeated again and again, with each image becoming more grotesque and distorted. That's how the universe looks near the event horizon of a black hole, one of the most warped places in the cosmos.

While physicists had some previous ideas about what such regions looked like, a new calculation has shown exactly what you would see around black holes, opening up potential new ways to test Einstein's theory of general relativity.

Around and around
The area near a black hole is very strange indeed. Looking directly at the heavy object wouldn't give your eyes much to focus on; light rays get swallowed by the black hole's event horizon, the point at which nothing can ever escape its massive gravitational influence.
But if you were to place a galaxy behind the black hole and then look off to the side, you'd see a distorted image of the galaxy. That's because some light from the galaxy would barely graze the edges of the black hole, without falling in.

Because of the black hole's extreme gravity, such light would get bent toward your line of sight. Strangely, the galaxy would appear to be far away from the black hole, not directly behind it.

The gravity around black holes is so intense, and space-time is so incredibly warped, that at a certain distance, light itself can orbit the black holes. Some of the light from a background galaxy even gets trapped, looping forever.